Orange County Becomes a Polish Joke

"'Evil' Currency Options Give Poland Its Orange County Moment" is today's headline over a Futures and Options Intelligence report on a Polish public backlash against risky derivatives.

Derivatives, of course, are the financial instruments nobody quite understands that were partly responsible for OC's 1994 bankruptcy, the largest municipal financial free-fall in history up to that time. Other culprits for the multi-billion-dollar fiasco included a wacked-out-of-his-noggin county treasurer, a country-club lax Orange County Board of Supervisors and bad astrological advice.

Jacek Maliszewski tells FOI that the Polish market will have to do the homework its American counterpart did through the 1990s, citing Orange County as an example of how severly a treasury team can lose money by misusing derivatives.

The Polish people are apparently adamant that their government not follow the burned-paper trail Orange County blazed.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.